James Gunn on Guardians of the Galaxy Rumors: “You Fan Journalists Need New Sources”

“You fan journalists need new sources,” tweeted the director yesterday afternoon, just hours after reports started to spread that about Nathan Fillion’s potential cameo role in Guardians.

He declined to elaborate on the remark — as he has done in the past when issuing a denial on social media, opting for his criticism of the press to stand on its own and to allow fans to draw their own conclusions. Barraged by follow-up requests from fans and bloggers, the only question he answered was whether he had signed a multi-picture deal with Marvel when he signed up for Guardians of the Galaxy (he said that he had, which is something he’s intimated elsewhere in the past. His exact phrasing — “As in more than one? Yes” — seems to suggest a two-film contract, but that’s 1) not confirmed and 2) not relevant to Gunn’s critique of the fan press.

The distinction between the “fan press” (typically bloggers, usually unpaid, often untrained and essentially doing news-oriented fan pages) and the specialty press (sites like ComicBook.com where paid reporters work a specialized entertainment news beat) has blurred in recent years. As fan-news sites that exercise looser editorial controls are able to deliver “exclusive” scoops to their audience, more traditional outlets which may not have run with the story based on an anonymous source will report on the existence of widespread rumors stemming from the blog report.

When Cosmic Booknews told everyone that Bryan Cranston was locked in to play Lex Luthor, for instance, many sites balked at the story and then felt obliged to run some acknowledgment of it later since without doing so, readers believed the sites to be ignorant of a seemingly-newsworthy story everyone was buzzing about.

Eventually, everyone from Warner to Cranston and the filmmakers agreed there had never been anything to the story, but not until one anonymous source or the blogger who was taken in by him had such an impact on the cultural discussion of the film that Cranston himself had to deny the rumors and Rolling Stone ran the rumor on its site.

While Gunn did not specify just what reports he was alluding to — and there are, of course, several bizarre rumors that spread on any given day online — the smart money is on reports that emerged yesterday claiming Nathan Fillion would play Cosmo, the talking, Russian dog, in Guardians.

Gunn has been cagey about whether Cosmo would appear in the film at all, never confirming that he would but also never denying it. Since Gunn says he makes it a practice never to lie to the fans outright, many have assumed that his unwillingness to confirm or deny means that the character is in the film. Bunched up with other things known to be true — Gunn has confirmed that Fillion has a small but cool cameo, and Fillion suggested fans stay for the credits, which suggested to many fans that he may be made up and/or voice acting, and thus difficult to pick out — the Cosmo rumors make a kind of sense.

The first this reporter saw of it, though, was a tweet from a fan not claiming to have any special knowledge but saying [paraphrasing here, since I don’t know who tweeted this or when], “You know what would be hilarious? If Fillion were to play Cosmo with a cheesy fake Russian accent.” It played into Fillion’s carefree online persona as well as the ’80s action movie motif of Guardians, and made a lot of sense. The comment got plenty of favorites and retweets long before rumors that he actually might have the job started to fly.

And that’s another common — and frustrating — problem with the rumor mill: if it’s in print somewhere, somebody will assume that it’s news. It’s impossible to say that the Cosmo rumor (if untrue) started with a tweet like the one I saw but if so, it wouldn’t be the first time.

The comics Internet spun into a frenzy not long ago when a “rumor” was circulating that Wonder Woman and the Amazons would prove to be ancient Kryptonians evolved from the inhabitants of the scout ships that crashed on Earth (Superman’s Fortress, which if you read the comic prequel to the film you know was piloted by Kara Zor-El). Turns out, though, that not only was that pure speculation and not a rumor in any meaningful way, but the writer in question made that clear in the same story where he proposed the story point. All it takes is one person to read something the wrong way and report it as they’re reading it for things to spin out of control.